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UbiSpectre Update on Lag

Justin Randall, GRO Tech Director shares more info

Hi everyone!

UbiSpectre here again to update you on our progress with the current network hiccups. I managed to corner Justin Randall, our GRO Tech Director, to wrestle out information and you may just be interested in his answers.

His team is currently focusing on identifying the sources of lag – much like killing a weed by attacking the root.

First, it’s important to know what we’re up against. What is "lag"? Justin defines lag as the latency between the transfer of input from the player to the game and the response time of what is displayed in the game. Let's break this down into three categories:

Network Lag – message-transmission delays between different networks across many providers. Any one of those providers could be experiencing congestion or hardware problems.

Server Side Lag – all in-game activities are interpreted and simulated in a server. This server processes the data and sends the results to the client so that the message can be displayed visually. If there are issues with the server hardware or current activities, you will experience it as lag.

CPU Lag in the Client – often caused by poor PC performance and can appear as lag.

Our DEVs are hunting the source of the issue based on these three points. If you’re experiencing lag, you may fall under any of the abovementioned situations.

Justin and the team are currently deploying bigger and better tools to help monitor GRO's performance. This will enable them to gather evidence faster and ultimately lead them to the culprit. Justin also specifically mentioned other current initiatives:

"The best measure of lag today comes from the objective feedback and experience from the community. The team also participates in daily live playtests so everyone is exposed to the problem. As developers, the team has greater insight on different kinds of lag based on in-game behavior. This knowledge alone is not enough, which is why it is so important to collect empirical data from the running service."

I took a picture of the 'tools'... with the chicken.

More programmers will join the anti-lag squad this week. This high priority fix will focus exclusively on screening the servers as well as optimizing CPU and disc performance to eliminate local lag on the server.

As your GRO ComDev I, UbiSpectre, will return next week with more insider news on the fight against lag. Until then: visit the website, follow us on Twitter, or drop by our Facebook page for more updates.

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